Lou Reed's rock and roll diary

Lou Reed listens to a question during a media conference at the Sydney Opera House in May 2010. AFP PHOTO / Greg WOODGREG WOOD/AFP/Getty Images

News of the death of Lou Reed hit me hard. I was sitting at my dad’s favourite cafe in the Pointe Claire village, eating lunch by myself after visiting my mum, when I first heard that Reed had died. My dad died early this year and every time I go to the cafe, it puts me in a pretty melancholy mood, though there’s also something nice about how everything there reminds me of all the great times Joe had there.

Someone asked me, on Facebook, if I had heard about Reed’s death. I was surprised by how upset I felt. It’s true this was not just another rock-star death for the very simple reason that Lou Reed wasn’t just another rock star.

I’m almost certain that the first Reed song I heard was Walk on the Wild Side, which was probably the only track of his to actually play on commercial radio, and even though it had a pretty slick sound – thanks Mr. Bowie – there was no mistaking that there was something happening here and I, like Mr. Jones, didn’t really know what it was but I sure wanted to find out. No question the sexual double-entendre struck a chord but it floored so many of us simply because it hinted that there was a whole darker, wilder world out there that had nothing to do with everything else that was playing on CKGM at the time.

Then I heard Sweet Jane, that pretty crap metal version on the live set Rock’n’Roll Animal, his bestselling album, and even that sub-par live take couldn’t disguise the fact this was an effin’ amazing rock anthem. Soon after I heard the original Velvet Underground versions of Sweet Jane and Rock’n’Roll – the cool thing is they sent chills down my spine in the mid-’70s and they had exactly the same impact on me when I slapped them on this afternoon.

It was only years – decades? – later that I realized how extraordinary it was that the same guy who wrote some of the darkest, grimiest songs in the history of rock – Heroin, the Berlin album – was also able to pen lines more inspirational than anything Bruce Springsteen ever wrote: “She started shakin’ to that fine fine music/You know her life was saved by rock’n’roll/Despite all the amputations/You know you could go out and dance to the rock’n’roll station/And it was alright.” Cue perfect guitar solo!

When punk came along and most every punk rocker cited those Velvets albums, I went out and bought The Velvet Underground & Nico, their 1967 debut, which famously sold almost no copies at the time but went on to become maybe the most influential record of the past five or six decades. It’s true that without the Velvets and Reed, there’s no punk rock but that first album also includes three of the most beautiful pop songs I’ve ever heard, in Sunday Morning, Femme Fatale and I’ll Be Your Mirror.

The best essay I’ve ever read on Reed was penned by the late, great critic Ellen Willis and unfortunately I can’t find it online. It’s her liner notes for the Rock and Roll Diary compilation from 1980. She suggests that Street Hassle, the title track from his 1978 album, was the best thing he’d written since Heroin and I couldn’t agree more.

Writes Willis: “During this eleven-minute exploration of sex, death, and love, Reed nails himself and the punks and you and me to the wall – then frees us.”

Listen to it and you’ll know there is no hyperbole in Willis’s prose. It’s as noir as Reed gets but it’s not about nihilism, it never was, it’s about making it through the worst crap life can throw at you and somehow coming out the other side with some kind of dignity intact.

It’s great writing. It’s great art. It’s great rock’n’roll. And it saved my life.

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